My order was suppose to be delivered today, but Federal Express has other plans. They left a note on the garage door saying they missed us despite someone being home all day. I will have to recently wait until tomorrow.

I order 6 new dress shirts for work, and they arrived today. This is the huge pile of junk I had to pull out of them. Each shirt took 3 minutes of pin, tag, and cardboard removal. I have no idea why all this was put into some dress shirts. Then again, I have no idea why such shirts list for $45 and can go on sale for $15.

Fridays are my short days at work. I usually get into the office around 6:40 am, and leave at 4:00 pm. By getting in early I have time before any distractions to get things done. It also allows me to beat morning traffic. This means I have completed my 40 hour work week by noon on Friday. I had so many hours this week I needed to get to work at 8:00 am so I could stay until noon. So I decided it was a perfect day to try biking into work.
The trip is just over 14 miles, and that's not a problem as I have been doing 14 mile trips regularly. I had already checked and found my work place has a bathroom with a shower. After a 14 mile ride I would need to rinse off or no one would want to be around me. My bike has plenty of storage so bringing a change of clothing wasn't a problem.
The morning was chilly with the airport was reading 48 °F. I decided it best to put on a sweatshirt, thermal pants, and a hat. I was glad I did. While the air was chilly, the ride was pleasant. I departed at 6:22 am and arrived at 7:31 am, traveling 14.2 miles. I was showered, changed, and sitting at my desk by 7:55 am. At 11:45 am I changed back into biking clothing, but skipped the extra cloths as it was now plenty warm for the return ride. On the way back I took a different route, stopping at a grocery store to pick up lunch. This made the return ride 14.8 miles for a daily total of 29 miles.
The trip worked well, but I need found I need to make some changes. First, I need a better bag for carrying cloths in and out of work. I also need to plan on having something to eat at work. I burned around 700 calories on the ride in, and had nothing but snack food at my desk. By the time I was back home I had burned around 1,400 calories and was quite hungry.

Day-by-day View Added to Operation Lux

Aging Port Wine

Added the ability to look at data from Operation Lux on a day-by-day basis. The previous/next day buttons show a complete 24 hour plot. If you watch closely as you go backward you can see the the first signs of daylight starting earlier and earlier. The decrease in total daylight isn't as observable. But it is clear what days are clear and which are not.

Observing Daylight Loss

I wondered if I had enough data to see the gradual loss of daylight. Even if I remove the cloudy days, the is clearly a slight downward trend. So the answer to my question is yes, I have enough data to see the loss in daylight. The Y-axis contains the daily energy in watt hours per meter squared for each day. The X-axis is the day. The linear regression line has a slope consistent with the shorting days. The big question is, how much will the combination of daylight loss, and sun's position vs trees effect the light? I have the equipment in place. Time will answer the question.

On Saturday the repairs to my bicycle were complete. A new front sprocket, chain, and rear cassette along with a full tune up. In addition I ordered some new toys for it which had all arrived. These included a cellphone bracket so I can watch my map while riding, replacement tail light since I somehow lost my old one, and a solar battery for my phone. The solar battery I picked up mostly for a large battery. My phone eats a lot of power when tracking my rides and I knew if I was to do any camping I wouldn't have the battery power for my phone to be able to navigate for all of it. It wasn't until yesterday I had a chance to take the bike out.
My cellphone bracket is nice. It does a pretty good job of holding my phone still while I ride. I had to disable the screen rotation sensor while riding as even on a fairly smooth path the phone shook enough to constantly be rotating the screen. The part I don't like about this is that I prefer the landscape view, but can't get this view without rotation enabled. An other downside is the bracket often hits buttons if I'm going over rough terrain. The solar battery works just fine, but I'll need a longer cable.
I did a 12.8 mile lap and managed to do it in under an hour. Seems I am improving.

Asteracea Milchillea

When we last left off, the group was at the arena placing bets. Annalis had just won a battle and the group had won 450 gold. Now Marv was entering the pit, and we planned on placing much larger bets. Marv weighting in at 30 stone faced off against the 35 stone Waldwulf Beornson, slayer of the Ice Dragon, 7 season raining champion. He fought with a a double bladed ax called Bleeder and sported a stylish red handlebar mustache. A skills challenge got betting underway. Ellenoria started with a 450 gold bet against Dorn Redbeard who lost to us the last time. Annalis pick-pocked some bros cheering for Waldwulf and found they had tricks for cheating. Andel cast a spell to distract Waldwulf with an annoying swarm of flies. Marv failed to find a weakness in his opponent, and Annalis failed to search for more tricks. Andel used diplomacy to increase bets by a further 70 gold. Ellenoria failed a bluff to increase the bed and we lost the skills challenge, thus no more bet increases.
The battle between Marv and Waldwulf was almost comical. Both failed to hit one an other for the first couple of rounds, but then Marv started doing some good damage. Then Waldwulf fumbled and was off balance. Marv followed up, knocking Waldwulf's champion belt off and causing Waldwulf's mussels to deflate. Now the champion, Marv took the belt and urinated on his fallen opponent, much to the dismay of his bro fans.

The group was approached by Asteracea “Aster” Milchillea, a tinny gnome with mossy hair that smokes and a weasel hiding in their cloak. As we were chatting we were approached by the constable. He said the house we destroyed was spewing out undead. In exchange for our fine forgiven we agreed to assist his men in getting rid of the undead. We had two men from the town helping us, but they were not much of a help. During the battle one was knocked unconscious, and the other fumbled and shattered his weapon. As usual, we were left with the brunt of the fighting.
Most of the undead were skeletons that were easily destroyed. However, their attacks did a lot of damage, including ongoing poison damage. Other undead were stronger, but did about the same amount of damage. We had time to clear the first ally of undead, but there was a lot of area left. Bruised and two fighters down we must continue the fight.